Create a low latency, high performance packet processing path (fast path)
through the NFVI that VNFs can take advantage of;

Measure Telco Traffic and Performance KPIs through that fast path;

Detect and report violations that can be consumed by VNFs and higher level
EMS/OSS systems

Examples of local measurable QoS factors for Traffic Monitoring which impact
both Quality of Experience and 5’9s availability would be (using Metro Ethernet
Forum Guidelines as reference):

Packet loss

Packet Delay Variation

Uni-directional frame delay

Other KPIs such as Call drops, Call Setup Success Rate, Call Setup time etc. are
measured by the VNF.

In addition to Traffic Monitoring, the NFVI must also support Performance
Monitoring of the physical interfaces themselves (e.g. NICs), i.e. an ability to
monitor and trace errors on the physical interfaces and report them.

All these traffic statistics for Traffic and Performance Monitoring must be
measured in-service and must be capable of being reported by standard Telco
mechanisms (e.g. SNMP traps), for potential enforcement actions.

In the figure above, the interfaces 1, 2, 3 are implemented along with a sample
application. The sample application will support monitoring of NIC
counters/status and will also support measurement of packet latency using DPDK
provided interfaces.

VNF specific processing, Traffic Monitoring, Performance Monitoring and
Management Agent are out of scope. The scope is limited to Intel 10G Niantic
support.

The Proposed MAC/PHY Interface Counters include:

Packet RX

Packet TX

Packet loss

Interface errors + other stats

The Proposed Packet Latency Monitor include:

Cycle accurate ‘stamping’ on ingress

Supports latency measurements on egress

Support for additional types of Network Interfaces can be added in the future.

Support for failover of DPDK enabled cores is also out of scope of the current
proposal. However, this is an important requirement and must-have functionality
for any DPDK enabled framework in the NFVI. To that end, a second phase of this
project will be to implement DPDK “Keep Alive” functionality that would address
this and would report to a VNF-level Failover and High Availability mechanism
that would then determine what actions, including failover, may be triggered.

Fig 1.1 shows how a sample application will be provided to demonstrate
usage. In reality many VNFs will have an existing performance or traffic
monitoring utility used to monitor VNF behavior and report statistics, counters,
etc.

To consume the performance and traffic related information provided within the
scope of this project should in most cases be a logical extension of any
existing VNF performance or traffic monitoring utility, in most cases it should
not require a new utility to be developed. We do not see the Software Fastpath
Service Quality Metrics data as major additional effort for VNFs to consume,
this project would be sympathetic to existing VNF architecture constructs. The
intention is that this project represents a lower level interface for network
interface monitoring to be used by higher level fault management entities (see
below).

Allowing the Software Fastpath Service Quality Metrics data to be handled within
existing VNF performance or traffic monitoring utilities also makes it simpler
for overall interfacing with higher level management components in the VIM, MANO
and OSS/BSS. The Software Fastpath Service Quality Metrics proposal would be
complementary to the Fault Management and Maintenance project proposal
(“Doctor”) which is also in flight, which addresses NFVI Fault Management
support in the VIM. To that end, the project committers and contributors for the
Software Fastpath Service Quality Metrics project wish to work in sync with the
“Doctor” project – to facilitate this, one of the “Doctor” contributors has also
been added as a contributor to the Software Fastpath Service Quality Metrics
project.